What lessons will the rest of the world learn from Germany’s renewable energy disaster?

Germany’s struggles with green energy should be a warning to leaders and policymakers around the world. Renewable energy isn’t ready for primetime, and no amount of government subsidies or green pie-in-the-sky hopes are going to change that.

Walter Russell Mead

Read the full story, titled Germany’s Green Plan is Crumbling, here.

In a nutshell: solar and wind energy lead to dramatically higher electricity prices. Business people say these prices, which are scheduled to continue to rise for decades, “will kill” German industry. As domestic electrical bills balloon, furious voters are giving politicians an ear full.

All of this was entirely predictable. Isn’t it odd, therefore, that exactly one month ago Bloomberg news ran a story titled U.S. Energy Policy Should Take a Lesson From Germany’s Energiewende.

According to that story, “Germany’s ambitious energy transformation” is such a success others should emulate it. The article goes out of its way to assure readers that “the economic sky has not fallen” in Germany.

It’s so dramatically different in tone and content, it could have been written by a Greenpeace employee. Oh, wait.

At the bottom of the article – which looks disturbingly like any other news story on Bloomberg‘s website – we discover that it was co-written by author Rainer Baake, a German green energy activist, and Jennifer Morgan.

Morgan used to be the World Wildlife Fund’s chief climate change spokesperson. These days she works for another environmental lobby group – when she isn’t serving as a review editor for that absolutely neutral and unbiased body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Bloomberg story is preserved for posterity here

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